


I Dare You

by SapphicScholar



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F, Ficlet, Fluff, Post-Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 10:13:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19271155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SapphicScholar/pseuds/SapphicScholar
Summary: From a Pride Month Prompt challenge for the word, "Sleepover"A story of Grace and Frankie's evolving friendship told over time through all those sleepovers Grace missed out on in childhood





	I Dare You

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Migrating this over from Tumblr - one of my early forays into attempting to write for these two who've had my heart for a while even if I'm only now venturing into the fandom side of things
> 
> Heads up on brief hints about some of the disordered eating/drinking patterns from canon

Grace’s second sleepover is just as unexpected as her first one had been. Her first, a night of squatting in a home that had, until so recently, been hers, was filled with floor mattresses and squealing pigs and lukewarm vodka and secret sharing that Frankie had insisted was part of the quintessential sleepover experience. Her second comes after a teary beach confession. Her knees ache from the attempt at running across the sand to a woman she’d once sworn she’d never voluntarily spend a single minute with; a sense of betrayal and loss still hang heavy in the air between them; and the night is filled with chilled vodka and apologies and explanations Grace feels compelled to provide even though she’s made it a policy ever since starting her own business never to justify her personal choices to anyone but herself—and sometimes she doesn’t even like to think too hard on her own about her life choices.

The third sleepover doesn’t arrive until the night the divorce is finalized, even though Grace has slept in the beach house plenty of times since then. But on the day everything goes through, Frankie meets her with a joint and a pile of Brat Pack movies that neither of them really want to see but Frankie insists are slumber party classics. The mattresses are already set up in the living room, though this time there’s an extra pillow for Grace’s knee, and there’s enough electricity to go around without siphoning it off the neighbors’ grid. Frankie is considerate enough to pretend not to notice the small sob quickly stifled in Grace’s sleeve as they’re both falling asleep.

From then on, the sleepovers become a semi-regular occurrence almost every month, with Frankie insisting that Grace was deprived of a very important adolescent ritual. Grace finds herself becoming accustomed to a whole host of party games that she can sometimes admit are fun, particularly when they’re played with a martini in hand.

During the fourth sleepover, after vetoing Twister by reminding Frankie about their afternoon spent as floor people together, Grace plays Truth or Dare for the first time (everyone in college had insisted they were much too mature for it by then). Among other dares, Grace ends up drinking an awful concoction of the first three things Frankie puts her hands on in the fridge while blindfolded, and Frankie, in turn, experiences the joys of one of her first martinis, though she insists the olives are the only decent part of the whole thing. Grace talks more about her first kiss with a girl, while Frankie regales Grace with tales of her first time getting stoned. The game skids to an abrupt end when a rather tipsy Frankie—“How do you drink more than one of these? The whole world’s staring backwards at me, Grace!”—asks Grace to talk about her best sexual experience for a truth.

At sleepover number five, Frankie introduces Grace to the joys of prank phone calls. Frankie goes first to show her how it’s done, calling Bud and asking in a lower voice if his refrigerator is running. Only, while she’s giggling, he lets out a loud sigh: “We’ve all got caller ID these days, Mom. I’m going, alright?” After that, a google search reveals the magic of *67, then a long rabbit hole of all the other * extensions. Grace, several martinis in, rolls her eyes but still gives in to Frankie’s pleading and manages a whole phone call to a San Diego bar asking if a Seymour Butts is there. Frankie tries Bud again when Coyote doesn’t answer, but Grace draws the line at her own daughters. She hasn’t told them about the sleepovers yet. She isn’t sure why, but she doesn’t want to share this…thing just yet. Like the handful of Say Yes nights, the sleepovers are something private. Something fun in a genuine way that stands so at odds with the kind of person Grace Hanson presents herself as to the rest of society. Something reserved for her and Frankie and no one else—them against the world.

Sleepover six is postponed by a week thanks to a family gathering, but Frankie makes up for lost time by coming down wholly prepared with tiny books and a handful of pens Grace recognizes as having gone missing from her purse and desk and bedside table over the past few weeks. They spend the night playing Mad Libs that Frankie delights in making as filthy as she can, cackling as Grace reads each half-nonsensical story back to her. She saves a particularly explicit one where scissoring had been her verb of choice because it had actually gotten a reaction out of Grace other than an eye roll or a deep sigh—though both of those had happened as well. Grace is too distracted by Frankie’s cries of excitement to notice that Frankie cuts her off after two martinis. The night doesn’t seem any less fun for the loss.

It’s at their seventh sleepover that Grace learns the joys of MASH and homemade fortune tellers. She’s quite pleased to learn that George Clooney will be her next husband and listens patiently as Frankie explains that they’ll live in a mansion and drive a Jeep—“You’re gonna have to use a whole can of hairspray every ride. I’ll light a candle for the poor Earth.”—and somehow manage to have another two children. Grace furrows her brow in confusion when Frankie appears just as delighted to learn that Grace will be her wife, even though they’ll be living in a shack with a pet snake and no car. Frankie had shrugged off Grace’s confusion, ready with an answer for every question. “We’re basically married now.” (Grace doesn’t question why the thought makes her stomach swoop, not unlike the sensation of cresting up and over a steep hill too fast in her car.) “Can’t be worse than Walden Villas, and we got through that together.” “Better than those wild fuckers in Santa Fe. Everywhere you went: surprise snakes!” “Cars are bad for the Earth. I need to make up for all your hairspray, Grace!”

One night, Grace arrives home after dinner with Brianna and Mallory to find a note waiting on the kitchen table that says nothing more than: “In the studio. Come over when home.”

There’s also a text waiting for her: “Plz bring cheese curls. Thnx!”

When she gets out to the studio, a bag of cheese curls tucked under her arm and her phone clutched in her hand, she finds that the whole space has been taken over by pillows and mattresses and colorful, draped sheets and swaths of fabric that she’d only vaguely registered Frankie bringing home over the past few months. Some of them shimmer with gold and silver threads embedded in the fabric, and the smell of incense wafts through the air.

“It looks like an opium den in here,” Grace mutters to herself.

A moment later, Frankie’s head pops out from a side entrance. “Really? Oh good, I was worried I might have gone too mainstream and hit hipster coffee shop.”

“No, no, solidly opium den.”

“Come in?”

And it’s going to hurt her knees and probably muss her hair, and she’d only voluntarily done this for her own grandchildren one time before deciding it was enough for a lifetime, but Frankie has done this for her, Frankie is waiting in there for her, so Grace will go.

Inside, Frankie waits with two glasses of wine, only half-filled, and a small plate of snacks that are a step up from the typical junk food fare on these nights that Grace refuses to touch until she’s too distracted to keep all of her attention focused on calories and sugar and fat.

“Have extra time today?” Grace asks, casting a glance around at the ornate decorations.

“You don’t just miss the one-year anniversary of your first ever intentional, non-squatting slumber party, now do you?” It’s said in that tone of voice that suggests everything is fine and light and breezy, that nothing matters more or less than anything else, which so easily slides into the idea that nothing matters to Frankie at all, but Grace catches the sense of sincerity lurking in the background. Some old memory pulls at the back of her mind—something about grand gestures and how important they were, something about their uses…

After a few minutes and a few false starts with Frankie attempting to ask something only to trail down on those long, winding tangents that lead her back to where she began only about half of the time, Frankie finally proposes that they play a good game of Truth or Dare.

It takes three rounds for Grace to choose dare, and Frankie takes a deep breath when she does. “I dare you to dare me to ask you something important next round.”

Grace may not have ever played the game before Frankie, but she’s fairly certain that isn’t how the rules work. Still, she nods anyway. It’s better not to disagree with Frankie, even when she does things like insisting that the entire phrase, “got to scissoring,” should count as a past tense verb for Mad Libs. So she asks Frankie, “Truth or dare?” and isn’t the least bit surprised when Frankie answers, “Dare.”

Frankie sits in silence, looking expectantly back at Grace.

“What?”

“Don’t you have something to dare me?”

Grace fixes Frankie with a disbelieving look, one eyebrow arched and her lips slightly pursed. “You already know what it is.”

“You have to dare me, though. Otherwise we might as well be playing the mind-reading game, and you know I’m always up to try it, but you never seem to be thinking about any of the things that I can see.”

“That’s because you always guess Del Taco burritos, martinis, and vibrators!” Just because two of those are true more often than she’d like them to be doesn’t make it a great guess.

“Grace,” Frankie nearly whines. “Are you going to dare me?”

“Fine.” Grace holds up her hands, trying to preempt an explanation about the ethics of accepting a dare and then reneging on the dared action. “I dare you to ask me something important.”

Frankie clasps her hands together in her lap, twisting at a chunky ring adorning her middle finger. “We’ve gone through a lot of shit together these past few years. And at our first ever sleepover, you asked me if I wanted to do something. I said no because, you know, we’re Grace and Frankie!” Grace nods along because she thinks she gets it, gets what it means to go from being Grace and Robert, and Frankie and Sol, to Grace and Frankie, and fuck Robert and Sol. “I squatted you until we were best friends, and now we have our thing. That thing where we get our house back and fight the bureaucratic machine that is the post office and make vibrators for people like us.”

“Okay.”

“But I can’t stop thinking about…that other thing. That thing that might make Grace and Frankie a different kind of thing. Well, we could still be amateur sleuths and fight the system and sell vibrators because how could we give any of that up when there are still so many Harriets out there that need us? Did you know—”

“Frankie!”

“Right. Anyway, if you don’t believe me that I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve got a whole bunch of paintings that aren’t as abstract as they should have been for Coyote’s last visit.” She gestures with her thumb somewhere behind her, which Grace has learned over years spent looking for ringing phones and TV remotes and bags of cheese curls doesn’t actually mean directly behind her, but instead means anywhere that isn’t directly in front of her. “So I thought maybe I could try asking it myself. Eh, well, not quite, but Grace Hanson, do you want to kiss me? No joking or pranks or take-backsies. Just…just me asking.”

Grace blinks. Pauses. Doesn’t wait long enough to parse through why it was that her heart and body screamed  _yes_  before her head had registered the implications of the question. For once, she lets herself act on an impulse that she suspects won’t be anything like the destructive ones born of too many drinks and not enough food. She leans forward, finds Frankie meeting her halfway. Her lips are a little chapped, though her mouth blessedly does not yet taste like cheese curl dust, and the first few seconds are clumsy as they try to figure out angles and noses and long hair that seems to find its way between their lips again and again. But even still, before they’ve found their rhythm, Grace knows without a doubt that it’s the best first kiss she’s ever had. She doesn’t pull back until they’ve gotten the hang of things well enough that her breathing is shallow and fast.

Frankie beams up at her—wide and unconcerned and exultant. “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t thrilled about the snake on that last MASH game, but maybe—and hear me out on this one—have you considered chickens?”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Twitter and Tumblr @sapphicscholar


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